Tag Archives: Authoritarianism

“One Vice President Away From a Coup”

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More journalists and Democratic politicians are focusing on the Republican attack on democracy, i.e. their efforts to insure that they win future elections, no matter how many votes they get. CNN quoted Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington:

We have to be Paul Revere every chance we get to let people know what is at risk and why it is at risk. . . . I don’t think you can be overly concerned about this. The American psyche has not recognized we were one vice president away from a coup.

The New York Times published an article about it on Saturday and another today:

From the second article:

American politics today is not really normal. It may instead be in the midst of a radical shift away from the democratic rules and traditions that have guided the country for a very long time.

An anti-democratic movement, inspired by D____ T____ but much larger than him, is making significant progress . . . . In the states that decide modern presidential elections, this movement has already changed some laws and ousted election officials, with the aim of overturning future results. It has justified the changes with blatantly false statements claiming that Biden did not really win the 2020 election.

The movement has encountered surprisingly little opposition. Most leading Republican politicians have either looked the other way or supported the anti-democratic movement. In the House, Republicans ousted Liz Cheney from a leadership position because she called out T____’s lies.

The pushback within the Republican Party has been so weak that about 60 percent of Republican adults now tell pollsters that they believe the 2020 election was stolen — a view that’s simply wrong.

Most Democratic officials, for their part, have been focused on issues other than election security, like Covid-19 and the economy. It’s true that congressional Democrats have tried to pass a new voting rights bill, only to be stymied by Republican opposition and the filibuster. But these Democratic efforts have been sprawling and unfocused. They have included proposals — on voter-ID rules and mail-in ballots, for example — that are almost certainly less important than a federal law to block the overturning of elections, as The Times’s Nate Cohn has explained.

All of which has created a remarkable possibility: In the 2024 presidential election, Republican officials in at least one state may overturn a legitimate election result, citing fraud that does not exist, and award the state’s electoral votes to the Republican nominee. T____ tried to use this tactic in 2020, but local officials rebuffed him.

Since then, his supporters have launched a campaign — with the Orwellian name “Stop the Steal” — to ensure success next time. Steve Bannon has played a central role, using his podcast to encourage T____ supporters to take over positions in election administration, ProPublica has explained. . . . 

The main battlegrounds are swing states where Republicans control the state legislature, like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Republicans control these legislatures because of both gerrymandered districts and Democratic weakness outside of major metro areas . . . The Constitution lets state legislatures set the rules for choosing presidential electors.

“None of this is happening behind closed doors,” Jamelle Bouie, a Times columnist, recently wrote. “We are headed for a crisis of some sort. When it comes, we can be shocked that it is actually happening, but we shouldn’t be surprised.”

Here is an overview of recent developments:

Arizona. Republican legislators have passed a law taking away authority over election lawsuits from the secretary of state, who’s now a Democrat, and giving it to the attorney general, a Republican. Legislators are debating another bill that would allow them to revoke election certification “by majority vote at any time before the presidential inauguration.”

Georgia. Last year, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, helped stop T____’s attempts to reverse the result. State legislators in Georgia have since weakened his powers, and a T____-backed candidate is running to replace Raffensperger next year. Republicans have also passed a law that gives a commission they control the power to remove local election officials.

Michigan. Kristina Karamo, a T____-endorsed candidate who has repeated the lie that the 2020 elections were fraudulent, is running for secretary of state, the office that oversees elections. (Republican candidates are running on similar messages in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere, according to ABC News.)

Pennsylvania. Republicans are trying to amend the state’s Constitution to make the secretary of state an elected position, rather than one that the governor appoints. Pennsylvania is also one of the states where T____ allies — like Stephen Lindemuth, who attended the Jan. 6 rally that turned into an attack on Congress — have won local races to oversee elections.

Wisconsin. Senator Ron Johnson is urging the Republican-controlled Legislature to take full control of federal elections. Doing so could remove the governor, currently a Democrat, from the process, and weaken the bipartisan state elections commission.

The new anti-democratic movement may still fail. This year, for example, Republican legislators in seven states proposed bills that would have given partisan officials a direct ability to change election results. None of the bills passed.

Arguably the most important figures on this issue are Republican officials and voters who believe in democracy and are uncomfortable with using raw political power to overturn an election result. . . . 

Unquote.

Meanwhile, Sen. Manchin of West Virginia, who claims to be a Democrat, is meeting tomorrow with a group of Democratic senators trying to reform the filibuster in order to protect voting rights:

Voting-rights advocates want to see if Manchin would be open to a “carve-out” to the Senate’s filibuster rule for voting rights legislation. The idea gained more urgency for voting rights advocates after the chamber approved a “one-time exception” to its rules to approve a debt-limit increase by a simple majority vote.

So What Are We Going To Do About It?

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Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer sounds a painfully loud alarm some don’t seem to hear:

. . . It sounded more like a plot twist from a really bad self-published political thriller than real life: A 38-page plan for President T____ to declare a “National Security Emergency” and seize ballots as part of a wider effort around Jan. 6 to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as [his] successor.

According to one slide from the presentation that T____’s top aide, then-chief of staff Mark Meadows, viewed and later turned over to congressional investigators, the president would endorse a bat guano-crazy conspiracy about Chinese interference in the 2020 presidential election as a pretext to declare all electronic votes invalid.

It’s the kind of transparently fake and utterly corrupt coup that you’d only expect to see in the type of less-developed country we used to call a banana republic. But as the Washington Post and other outlets reported this week, the wackadoodle plan for T____ to stay in office after losing an election, thus ending American democracy, was circulated on Capitol Hill just two days before 147 Republicans indeed voted against certifying Biden’s wins in key states.

I know, it seems kind of funny — this nerdy tech tool that Bill Gates and his Microsoft monolith acquired to propel regional sales meetings in Duluth instead being used in the plot to end the American Experiment after 245 years. But the quickening flow of leaks and new discoveries from the House committee probing the Jan. 6 insurrection is no laughing matter.

Even though it should have been obvious in real time — an angry mob, urged by T____ himself first to come to Washington on Jan. 6 and then to march on the U.S. Capitol, where there was a violent clash with police, injuring some 150 officers and killing five, thus disrupting Congress and the certification of Biden’s victory for hours — the new disclosures have brought into sharper focus what the president’s men knew and when they knew it. Jan. 6 was a far greater threat to American democracy than Watergate, or anything else that’s happened since the first shots at Fort Sumter. Now, the questions are becoming less about what we know, and more about … what are we going to do about this?

Last week saw a cluster of news stories — some coming from the slowly forward-moving House select committee — that continue to confirm greater White House involvement in Jan. 6 planning. This clearer picture also shows an escalating, increasingly desperate T____-led effort to block the fair and legitimate counting of the 2020 votes, from the courts to the corridors of Congress to, finally, the bloody barricades.

For example, a report that two of the Jan. 6 event organizers met privately with T____ in a White House dining room just two days before the insurrection should cement the idea that the events leading up to the fateful day were closely coordinated with the president and his inner circle — a point that was arguably already driven home by recent confirmation of a Jan. 6 “war room” run by close T____ associates at the Willard Hotel.

But other new what-the-heck disclosures about the events leading up to Jan. 6 are a reminder that there are still things we don’t know or fully understand. . . . 

The sum impact of these disclosures should pressure the House committee to both speed up the pace of its methodical investigation and also to hold more public hearings — the arena where the average voter is more likely to watch and understand the threat to the peaceful transfer of power that was posed on Jan. 6. In a perfect world, both the new bombshell revelations and high-profile hearings in the mode of 1973′s Watergate Summer would light a match under the Justice Department and deer-in-the-headlights Attorney General Merrick Garland.

High-stakes public hearings might also shake the Beltway inertia that the threat to democracy posed by the insurrection should take a backseat to other matters having more impact on voters’ day-to-day lives, including the never-ending pandemic and the economic aftershocks, good and bad. Many in the elite Washington media seem to have adopted the mantra that it’s time to move on from Jan. 6, especially since any coup ambitions were seemingly thwarted with President Biden’s inauguration. Some tried to tamp down the disclosure of the coup-plotting PowerPoint circulating among T____’s highest aides and congressional allies, arguing that the existence of the document isn’t “a hair-on-fire moment” for the American system.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that the originator of the PowerPoint plan appears to be a Texas-based retired Army colonel (who, interestingly, specialized in psyops) named Phil Waldron, who’d managed to first get his ideas and then himself woven into T____’s inner circle, including a close relationship with the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. . . . He told the Post he visited the White House multiple times in the days after the November 2020 election, met personally with Meadows and was part of those critical pre-Jan. 6 briefings on Capitol Hill. Waldron also said he met personally with T____ and “several Pennsylvania legislators” in the Oval Office last Nov. 25 . . . 

As crazy as Waldron’s claims of Chinese-led election tampering or his remedies of seizing paper ballots under a “national security emergency” might sound, it’s important to understand how close this plot came to succeeding. If days of hounding and pressuring then-Vice President Mike Pence to go along with the plan had worked, or if the subsequent violence had created a pathway for T____ to send in Army troops to seize control of the Capitol before Biden’s certification, America would have been plunged into . . . chaos.

The unsavory cast of characters that Team T____ was dealing with prior to Jan. 6 were the political equivalent of walking into a mobbed-up bar and trying to hire a hitman — to whack U.S. democracy. Hiring a hitman is considered a felony, even when no one is ultimately killed, and so is a plot to overthrow the American government, even if it fell short. It’s past time for Congress, Garland, the media and other key players to see this.

But there’s an even more important reason for the Jan. 6 disclosures to be seen and understood as the most important story in America right now: Bolstered by the lack of consequences so far for T____ and his inner circle, the coup attempt is ongoing. As the unpunished leader of a Republican Party that this antidemocracy ex-president has now spent six years bending to his will, T____ is currently leading an effort to change laws and remove any balky GOP officials who thwarted him in 2020 — to make sure he will be declared the winner in 2024, regardless of the reality-based vote count.

The New York Times reported this weekend that many believers in T____’s stolen-election conspiracy theories or even people who traveled to Washington on Jan. 6 are winning or the early favorites for a number of key vote-counting positions for 2022 and 2024, from the new judge of elections in the small town of Mt. Joy, Pa., to the powerful secretaries of state in the battlegrounds that cost T____ the presidency last year.

“This is a five-alarm fire,” Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, told the Times, adding: “If people in general, leaders and citizens, aren’t taking this as the most important issue of our time and acting accordingly, then we may not be able to ensure democracy prevails again in ‘24.”

Unfortunately, not enough people are acting accordingly. Any student of the last century of world history knows the seriousness of underestimating the rise of authoritarianism in far-flung precincts, that while the media is obsessing on the petty squabbles among, say, the Social Democrats, or the delusions of a decrepit ruling class, a madman who failed but learned from one aborted putsch is busy perfecting the second assault.

The only thing wrong with describing the PowerPoint for an all-American coup as a “hair-on-fire moment” is that the term is way too small to describe the existential threat that’s smoldering, unextinguished, in the rotting foundation of the United States and its increasingly haywire experiment. It’s been said before, but whatever you would have done in 1933 Germany or 1963 Alabama is what you are doing in 2021 America. We can speed up the hearings, put the biggest story on the front page, and arrest the coup plotters, or we can let the fire burn. The choice is ours.

If You Care About American Democracy and the Truth

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The Atlantic magazine isn’t afraid to publish long articles. Today they published one that every American who cares about the future of this country should read, or at least skim (or, if you happen to be reading this, trust your humble blogger to summarize. The Atlantic article is 13,000 words long. This post, with my contributions in italics, is 2,600).

The article is called “T____’s Next Coup Has Already Begun”. Its subtitle is “January 6 was practice. [The] GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election”. Its author is Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. It’s truly scary if you care about democracy. Here’s how it begins:

Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.

The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.

Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.

“The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.”

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied D____ T____’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

By way of foundation for all the rest, T____ and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.

Any Republican might benefit from these machinations, but let’s not pretend there’s any suspense. Unless biology intercedes, D____ T____ will seek and win the Republican nomination for president in 2024. The party is in his thrall. No opponent can break it and few will try. Neither will a setback outside politics—indictment, say—prevent T____ from running. If anything, it will redouble his will to power.

As we near the anniversary of January 6, investigators are still unearthing the roots of the insurrection that sacked the Capitol and sent members of Congress fleeing for their lives. What we know already, and could not have known then, is that the chaos wrought on that day was integral to a coherent plan. In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal.

Even in defeat, T____ has gained strength for a second attempt to seize office, should he need to, after the polls close on November 5, 2024. It may appear otherwise—after all, he no longer commands the executive branch, which he tried and mostly failed to enlist in his first coup attempt. Yet the balance of power is shifting his way in arenas that matter more.

T____ is successfully shaping the narrative of the insurrection in the only political ecosystem that matters to him. The immediate shock of the event, which briefly led some senior Republicans to break with him, has given way to a near-unanimous embrace. Virtually no one a year ago, certainly not I, predicted that T____ could compel the whole party’s genuflection to the Big Lie and the recasting of insurgents as martyrs. Today the few GOP dissenters are being cast out. “2 down, 8 to go!” T____ gloated at the retirement announcement of Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 House Republicans to vote for his second impeachment.

T____ has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. T____ has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.

Gellman then writes in detail about a typical proponent of the Big Lie: a retired New York City Fire Department captain, 61 years old, who has no doubts about the 2020 election:

“There ain’t no fucking way we are letting go of 3 November 2020,” he said. “That is not going to fucking happen. That’s not happening. This motherfucker was stolen. The world knows this bumbling, senile, career corrupt fuck squatting in our White House did not get 81 million votes.”

This retired fire fighter is totally immersed in the Big Lie and related propaganda. Gellman then explains who showed up in Washington on January 6 and are among the Big Lie’s most ardent supporters:

The findings were counterintuitive. Counties won by T____ in the 2020 election were less likely than counties won by Biden to send an insurrectionist to the Capitol. The higher T____’s share of votes in a county, in fact, the lower the probability that insurgents lived there. Why would that be? Likewise, the more rural the county, the fewer the insurgents. The researchers tried a hypothesis: Insurgents might be more likely to come from counties where white household income was dropping. Not so. Household income made no difference at all.

Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state. . . . 

What [researchers saw] in these results did not fit the government model of lone wolves and small groups of extremists. “This really is a new, politically violent mass movement,” he told me. “This is collective political violence.”

In other words, white people, average age 40, who think they, the real Americans, are being replaced by people with darker skins. It turns out that Gellman’s NYFD retiree fits the bill. He lives in The Bronx, an urban area with changing demographics, and is filled with resentments about minorities being given preferential treatment (even though he got a job with the NY City Fire Department and rose to the rank of captain).

Next, Gellman delves into the way T____, his lawyers and supporters tried to fix the 2020 election by getting courts and state legislatures to intervene and by interfering with the election’s certification by Congress on January 6. T____ and his movement didn’t get it done, but learned a lot in the process. They plan to do much better next time:

A year ago I asked the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse how he explained the integrity of the Republican officials who said no, under pressure, to the attempted coup in 2020 and early ’21. “I think it did depend on the personalities,” he told me. “I think you replace those officials, those judges, with ones who are more willing to follow the party line, and you get a different set of outcomes.”

Today that reads like a coup plotter’s to-do list. Since the 2020 election, Trump’s acolytes have set about methodically identifying patches of resistance and pulling them out by the roots. Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, who refused to “find” extra votes for Trump? Formally censured by his state party, primaried, and stripped of his power as chief election officer. Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan, who certified Biden’s victory? Hounded off the Board of State Canvassers. Governor Doug Ducey in Arizona, who signed his state’s “certificate of ascertainment” for Biden? T____ has endorsed a former Fox 10 news anchor named Kari Lake to succeed him, predicting that she “will fight to restore Election Integrity (both past and future!).” Future, here, is the operative word. Lake says she would not have certified Biden’s victory in Arizona, and even promises to revoke it (somehow) if she wins. None of this is normal.

Arizona’s legislature, meanwhile, has passed a law forbidding Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, to take part in election lawsuits, as she did at crucial junctures last year. The legislature is also debating an extraordinary bill asserting its own prerogative, “by majority vote at any time before the presidential inauguration,” to “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election.” There was no such thing under law as a method to “decertify” electors when T____ demanded it in 2020, but state Republicans think they have invented one for 2024.

In at least 15 more states, Republicans have advanced new laws to shift authority over elections from governors and career officials in the executive branch to the legislature. Under the Orwellian banner of “election integrity,” even more have rewritten laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Death threats and harassment from T____ supporters have meanwhile driven nonpartisan voting administrators to contemplate retirement. . . . 

Amid all this ferment, T____’s legal team is fine-tuning a constitutional argument that is pitched to appeal to a five-justice majority if the 2024 election reaches the Supreme Court. This, too, exploits the GOP advantage in statehouse control. Republicans are promoting an “independent state legislature” doctrine, which holds that statehouses have “plenary,” or exclusive, control of the rules for choosing presidential electors. Taken to its logical conclusion, it could provide a legal basis for any state legislature to throw out an election result it dislikes and appoint its preferred electors instead. . . . 

Four justices—Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas—have already signaled support for a doctrine that disallows any . . .  deviation from the [explicit] election rules passed by a state legislature [such as a judge extending voting hours]. It is an absolutist reading of legislative control over the “manner” of appointing electors under Article II of the U.S. Constitution. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s last appointee, has never opined on the issue. . . . 

T____ is not relying on the clown-car legal team that lost nearly every court case last time. The independent-state-legislature doctrine has a Federalist Society imprimatur and attorneys from top-tier firms like Baker Hostetler. A dark-money voter-suppression group that calls itself the Honest Elections Project has already featured the argument in an amicus brief.

“One of the minimal requirements for a democracy is that popular elections will determine political leadership,” Nate Persily, a Stanford Law School expert on election law, told me. “If a legislature can effectively overrule the popular vote, it turns democracy on its head.” Persily and UC Irvine’s Hasen, among other election-law scholars, fear that the Supreme Court could take an absolutist stance that would do exactly that.

Gellman’s conclusion:

There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.

Democracies have fallen before under stresses like these, when the people who might have defended them were transfixed by disbelief. If ours is to stand, its defenders have to rouse themselves. . . . 

Biden’s list of remedies [is] short and grossly incommensurate with the challenge. He expressed support for two bills—the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—that were dead on arrival in the Senate because Democrats had no answer to the Republican filibuster. He said the attorney general would double the Department of Justice staff devoted to voting-rights enforcement. Civil-rights groups would “stay vigilant.” Vice President Kamala Harris would lead “an all-out effort to educate voters about the changing laws, register them to vote, and then get the vote out.”

And then he mentioned one last plan that proved he did not accept the nature of the threat: “We will be asking my Republican friends—in Congress, in states, in cities, in counties—to stand up, for God’s sake, and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our elections and the sacred right to vote.”

So: enforcement of inadequate laws, wishful thinking about new laws, vigilance, voter education, and a friendly request that Republicans stand athwart their own electoral schemes.

Conspicuously missing from Biden’s speech was any mention even of filibuster reform, without which voting-rights legislation is doomed. Nor was there any mention of holding T____ and his minions accountable, legally, for plotting a coup. . . .  Absent consequences, they will certainly try again. An unpunished plot is practice for the next.

T____ came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago. He is preparing in plain view to do it again, and his position is growing stronger. Republican acolytes have identified the weak points in our electoral apparatus and are methodically exploiting them. They have set loose and now are driven by the animus of tens of millions of aggrieved T____ supporters who are prone to conspiracy thinking, embrace violence, and reject democratic defeat. Those supporters, [the] “committed insurrectionists,” are armed and single-minded and will know what to do the next time T____ calls upon them to act.

Democracy will be on trial in 2024. A strong and clear-eyed president, faced with such a test, would devote his presidency to meeting it. Biden knows better than I do what it looks like when a president fully marshals his power and resources to face a challenge. It doesn’t look like this.

The midterms, marked by gerrymandering, will more than likely tighten the GOP’s grip on the legislatures in swing states. The Supreme Court may be ready to give those legislatures near-absolute control over the choice of presidential electors. And if Republicans take back the House and Senate, . . .  the GOP will be firmly in charge of counting the electoral votes.

Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, D____ T____ may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance.

Unquote.

Maybe the president, the vice president, the attorney general, your senators, your member of Congress, your governor, your state legislators and people you know personally need to be more concerned about what’s happening and do something, anything, to stop it. There’s no better time than the present to act.

Something Not To Be Thankful For

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Brian Klaas, an associate professor of global politics at University College London, asks an important question:

Is there any way to reverse the Republican Party’s lurch toward violent, authoritarian lunacy?

For the past decade, I’ve studied the rise of authoritarianism and the breakdown of democracy around the world. Traveling from Madagascar to Thailand and Belarus to Zambia, I’ve tried to understand how despotic politicians and authoritarian political parties systematically destroy democracy. And based on that research, I have some bad news: The party of Reagan and Romney is long dead. The party of T____ is here to stay.

What has happened in the United States over the past five years is, in many ways, a classic of the autocratic genre. A populist leader rose to power, attacked the press, politicized rule of law, threatened to jail his opponents, demonized minorities, praised dictators abroad, spread conspiracy theories and lies, and then sought to seize power despite losing an election.

When such despotic figures emerge in democracies, their political party has two options: push back against the would-be despot while reasserting democratic principles, or remake the party in his image. Republicans have quite clearly chosen the latter path.

The big question now is: Can this be reversed? Can Republicans go back to being a broadly pro-democracy party that operates within democratic constraints and accepts election defeats without inventing false claims?

There are a few ways political parties that drift toward authoritarianism can be brought back from the brink. Sadly, none of them can save the modern GOP.

Authoritarian parties can be reformed when they suffer a crushing electoral defeat. If Republicans were wiped out at the polls in 2022, there would be a decent chance the GOP would move back to a more normal center-right party. That outcome is unlikely, however, precisely because the party’s anti-democratic tactics are insulating Republican politicians from voter backlash. Already, Republican lawmakers have drawn gerrymandered maps that rig future elections in their favor. In Wisconsin, for example — a state Joe Biden narrowly won — the new maps will likely give Republicans 75 percent of the state’s seats in the House of Representatives. Even if Democrats get more votes, Republicans would win more seats.

Republicans could conceivably abandon such practices if their leaders were being pressed by their own supporters to be more democratic. Instead, we’re seeing the opposite: GOP voters want more authoritarianism. The Republican political base doesn’t just believe T____’s lies about the 2020 election. These voters are now using those lies as a litmus test — to separate the true believers from alleged “RINOs” who believe in democracy more than they believe in D____ T____. Candidates are responding by stating that they believe T____’s lies as a point of pride in their campaign messaging. This trend is creating a ratcheting effect, motivating Republican candidates to establish increasingly extreme authoritarian credentials to stand out.

The Republican Party could also be driven away from authoritarianism by a charismatic rival to T____ who believes in democracy. If a Mitt Romney-style figure were currently electrifying the Republican base, it would be a lot easier to imagine a more democratic future for the GOP.

Instead, Romney is a Republican pariah who is viewed more positively by Democrats than Republicans. He narrowly avoided being attacked by a violent mob of pro-T____ Republicans on Jan. 6, which is as good a metaphor as you can get for the fate that awaits Republican leaders who try to stem their party’s authoritarian tide. And when a Republican tries to investigate the Jan. 6 rioters to hold them accountable, he or she becomes a pariah, too. (Just ask Rep. Liz Cheney.) Meanwhile, the rising stars in the party are extremist zealots who are sympathetic to the insurrectionists such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Meaningful media backlash isn’t realistic, either. Although plenty of journalists and pundits have finally started to describe Republican authoritarianism without mincing words, T____’s efforts to discredit mainstream media outlets have paid partisan dividends. Many T____ supporters only tune into partisan media outlets that amplify what they already believe. Here, too, the trend is also heading in the wrong direction. Fox News, the center of that right-wing media universe, is facing pressure from the more extreme talking heads at outlets such as One America News and Newsmax.

What’s left, then, is some distant hope that a profound national crisis could jolt Republicans away from their embrace of authoritarian politics. Just as the tragedy of September 11 brought Democrats and Republicans together, perhaps a major national shock could cause Republicans to rally back toward democracy. But we’ve already had two major crises — January 6 and a once-in-a-century pandemic — and they’ve made the GOP more extreme, not less. If a violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol aimed at overturning an election and more than 770,000 dead Americans in the pandemic aren’t enough of a jolt, what would it take?

The conclusion is depressing, but we must face reality: The battle for the Republican Party is over. The T____ian authoritarians have won — and they’re not going to be defeated by pro-democracy Republicans anytime soon.

Unquote.

With no looming crisis or common enemy on the horizon, there are probably only two ways to cripple today’s Republican Party.

(1) Every Democrat in Congress recognizes the problem and decides to pass the Freedom To Vote Act, a bill that would protect voting rights and increase the number of voters.

(2) The “low information” voters who can’t decide between the two parties show up at the polls and help vote authoritarian Republicans out of office.

Convincing a couple politicians who call themselves Democrats to do their job sounds easier than getting millions of the ignorant or dim-witted to change their ways. You can send Senator Sinema a message even if you don’t live in Arizona. Likewise, you can send Senator Manchin a message even if you don’t live in West Virginia.

It’s Not Polarization. It’s Republican Radicalization.

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Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post hits the political nail on the head:

Listen to political scientists, pollsters and well-meaning elected officials, and you’ll likely hear a lot of chatter about “polarization.” That characterization of our current political environment misses the point — and is dangerous.

You know the argument: America is divided into warring camps. The center has collapsed. Compromise is impossible. We have become uncivil and angry.

While it’s true that the country is more deeply divided along partisan lines than it has been in the past, it is wrong to suggest a symmetrical devolution into irrational hatred. The polarization argument too often treats both sides as equally worthy of blame, characterizing the problem as a sort of free-floating affliction (e.g., “lack of trust”). This blurs the distinction between a Democratic Party that is marginally more progressive in policy positions than it was a decade ago, and a Republican Party that routinely lies, courts violence and seeks to define America as a White Christian nation.

The Republican Party’s tolerance of violence is not matched by Democrats. Nor is the Republican Party’s refusal to recognize the sanctity of elections. Democrats did not call the elections they lost in 2020 and 2021 “rigged,” nor are they seeking to replace nonpartisan election officials with partisan law makers. Republicans’ determination to change voting laws based on their insistence that Donald Trump won the 2020 election is without historical precedent.

The Republican Party’s willingness to force a default on the debt is likewise indicative of a party that has fallen into nihilism. And Republicans’ refusal to give a sitting president’s Supreme Court nominee a hearing followed by the effort to push through a nominee of their own party during an election shows the party lacks any modicum of restraint and respect for institutions.

Only one party conducts fake election audits, habitually relies on conspiracy theories and wants to limit access to the ballot. A recent study from the libertarian think tank R Street found: “In Republican states, legislation tended to scale back the availability of mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes and to provide more uniform, if not shorter, early voting windows. Meanwhile, in Democratic states, legislators sought to increase the availability of early voting not only by expanded voting windows but also by instating universal vote-by-mail.”

Only one party overwhelmingly refused to participate in a bipartisan investigation of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Only one party tolerates and defends House members who resort to violent imagery and harass fellow lawmakers. Talk of “secession” comes from only one party. Only one party is turning a vigilante who killed two people and seriously injured another into a folk hero. Only one party rises in defense of parents publicly threatening school boards. Only one party has taken to defending book-banning and book-burning. Governors of only one party are suing private companies and localities that follow coronavirus guidelines.

Only one party has a media machine that propagates misinformation (from conspiracy theories about the death of a young Democratic National Committee staffer to the blatant lies about Dominion Voting Systems) and foments racism with a steady diet of “replacement theory” rants and hyperventilation about immigrants. Only one party pounds away at the already debunked connection between crime and immigrants solely for the purpose of enraging and scaring voters.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) had it almost right when she wrote in May, “The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.” The GOP has already decided. The answer is no.

When it comes to compromise, only one party refused to cast a single vote in favor of the American Rescue Plan. Only one party in the Senate (minus a lone Alaska Republican) categorically refuses to debate voting reform or to consider reauthorizing Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Take any issue, and one can see the difference between mutual polarization and radicalization. It is not merely that Republicans want to restrict abortions; they dangle bounties for those who aid women who seek abortions after six weeks of pregnancy (roughly 85 percent of all abortions) and attempt to shield the legislation from judicial review.

Republicans no longer seek merely to defend the Second Amendment; they fetishize guns. As Second Amendment advocate David French writes, “The ‘gun picture’ is a common pose for populist politicians. . . .  [She doesn’t mention that the Republican-controlled Supreme Court seems to be leaning toward making it easier to carry a gun in places like New York City.]

Likewise, Republicans do not merely object to significant tax increases on the super rich and corporations; they reject any tax changes that would force them to pay something in taxes and refuse to adequately fund the Internal Revenue Service to collect taxes already owed . . . .

The “polarization” decriers cop out when describing the country in terms that suggest both sides are to blame. Honesty compels us to recognize that while progressives might have more ambitious goals for government, they work within the democratic structure and acknowledge reality. The same cannot be said of Republicans. Let’s face it: We would not have a democracy crisis and an epistemological crisis if not for the Republican Party.

Unquote.

The Post’s Paul Waldman focuses on an aspect of the Republican Party’s radicalization that Rubin didn’t highlight (“the redistricting apocalypse is here”):

The word “redistricting” doesn’t carry the same inherent drama as a crowd of rabid thugs breaking doors and windows to storm the Capitol. But the way it’s proceeding right now, in its own way it’s just as much of an assault on our democracy. . . . 

Not only are Republicans frantically redrawing lines to increase their advantage; they’re doing it in a way that in place after place ensures that the results of every election will be clear long before any candidates debate issues or voters contemplate their choices. . . .

This is not ordinary partisan jockeying. It has been taken to an entirely new level, as a Republican campaign more than a decade in the making comes to fruition. Its goal is not merely to give Republicans an advantage in close elections. Its goal is to make elections irrelevant, so that no matter what the voters want, Republicans always stay in power.

Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer issues the same warning:

Republicans — who control the majority of state legislatures, partly because of their radical gerrymandering a decade ago — are for the most part [creating] a national map that would make next year’s midterm outlook bleak for Democrats even if the party bounced back to roughly even in [the] polls. Typical is the remapping process in competitive states that lean slightly Republican like North Carolina — where party registration is roughly equal yet the new districts tilt 10-4 for the GOP — or Ohio, where Republicans who got 55% of the 2020 presidential vote gerrymandered a stunning 12-3 congressional edge. . . . 

If anything, what Republicans are willing to do with T____ out of power could ultimately prove an even greater threat to democracy than actually having the authoritarian-yet-inept T____ in the White House. Democrats need to begin sounding this alarm today — that voters who turned out in near-record numbers in 2020 to defeat the culture of T____ism need to defy history and show up next November, to prevent something even worse. 

Unquote.

Aside from voting in record numbers next year, we also have to pressure a small number of Democratic senators (Manchin and Sinema especially) to pass a strong voting rights bill before it’s too late. Convincing a few senators to see reason should be easier than convincing millions more Democrats to vote in an off-year election.